


Theories on Interpretation

by Etnoe



Category: Dredd (2012)
Genre: Gen, Partnership, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4194390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etnoe/pseuds/Etnoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, as a psychic, Anderson has to do some work before she can figure out what she's really seeing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Theories on Interpretation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roseveare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseveare/gifts).



> This touches on some fairly gross images, though it doesn't go into detail. The request asked for comics influence, and it seems one of my major takeaways from the comics is that they were never shy about getting gross.

Aside from the sky and the thickness of the air, it was a near-undefinable hunch that led Judge Anderson to request back-up for her day's patrol, and that the back-up be Dredd. Hunches went a pretty long way when you were psi-capable - that request counted for one out of fifteen office usages she got per year. The number would go up the longer she managed to keep herself alive and effective, and if her visions proved to be reliable enough.

There were other partners she could have asked for. But Dredd pulled ahead of them simply because he never complained that Anderson's hunches so rarely came in forms like 'duck in 30 seconds' or advised her to ensure that next time and next unexpected bout of gunfire, it would. If only he did complain about some things out loud, or if she could really believe that he complained about things even in the relative privacy of his mind, he might have been her most favoured person to team up with. As it was, he was mostly handy for being completely unflappable.

They'd just pulled up to exit the premises on their patrol bikes when Anderson said, "It's very colourful all of a sudden. Does it feel colourful to you around here?"

"Judges don't go in for that kind of language. Euphemisms," Dredd snorted, then shifted his focus off the crowds ahead of them and over to her, light shifting in his helmet. "But from the way your pupils are dilating..."

"And now some of the colours are off-spectrum. That doesn't happen a lot." She looked balefully upwards, dragging the rainbows at the edges of her vision up along the curved-looking heights of the Mega-Blocks. The sky looked as burnt-out as ever. She was almost sure, growing ever surer as the day wore on, that that wouldn't last, and it made her stomach churn.

She looked down and reset her gaze to ahead of them. Time to kick off and get out there. Try and figure out what this sight in her head and halfway in front of her eyes meant, when normally the things she saw came in clear flashes, easily connected to something she touched, or at least something she was near. These colours pulsed with no connection to anything.

It was still a fairly good day, though, Anderson decided. Even now that she'd spent an obvious amount of time staring at the sky, Dredd just fell into position with her on his bike and didn't say a single word about asking her to predict the weather. When you were psi-capable, you learned to appreciate that really early on.

*

Anderson also would have appreciated not getting the visions she was getting. They'd checked out gangs that identified themselves under banners of the kinds of colours she was seeing, and more desperately, they'd checked out shops selling rainbow-casting glass prisms and exhibitions of impressionistic art. It was good for reminding citizens of various quarters of the law's presence, and had resulted in a couple of pick-ups related to outstanding warrants, but nothing to account for the persistence of this vision - rising and falling in her sight without end, without the clear kind of visual information she was used to picking up and decoding.

And now - after a call from HQ to direct them to a possible lead on several missing persons' cases - the visions had changed.

"Worse?" Dredd said. He was facing straight ahead, so it was probably his helmet's peripherals picking up on how carefully she placed her feet as they made their way through the sewer. The rave up ahead was making her want to put her own on so she could filter sound to cut out the music, but that would also cut down on the visions.

"Nothing I can't handle," Anderson said through gritted teeth. Her weapon was held at the officially sanctioned height and angle she'd been drilled on in training (she'd passed her test to become a Judge, but still didn't feel up to giving him anything to complain about), and it aimed the gun right through the centre of the things she saw. The things laughing at them. The things that really shouldn't be what they were... It was a narrow field of vision, but in a tunnel like this it wouldn't cause any trouble, especially since both of them were doing regular scans of the environment, checking the tunnel up and down, side to side.

The strobe lights up ahead at the rave... "Off-spectrum colours, among all the normal ones," Dredd said, "like your vision."

"Yeah," she breathed, trying not to feel too much relief yet. "And my colours just started matching the beat of these. One thing down," she said, and they crept forwards to meet it.

The Downer Drowner Rave was teetering on the brink of well-courted disaster. Dressed in darks and like they'd been dressed _in_ the dark, a pack of Mega City One residents were wailing, cry, lamenting as heartfelt as they could - standing on floating platforms that dipped with their mood towards the bottom of the sewer, then shrieking with horror or delight or whatever emotional response they could desperately make up or drug into themselves to swoop back up high within a split second.

Or they'd drown, if they fell in between the walkways and sparse safety nets strung across the deeper part of the sewer. And since there was enough drowning happening already, to an idle cacophony of horror/laughter/sympathy from fellow partygoers, the judges dove in.

The citizens of Mega City One rarely let anyone stand in the way of their fun, or whatever they'd decided passed for it. Some immediately began shrieking with the shock of having been caught out by authorities, and others, high and stupid, swooped at them on their floating platforms.

At least they seemed happier while doing it.

There was only so much force that Anderson could judiciously approve herself using against unarmed dumbasses, but these people were out to hurt. She shot the platforms of anyone she could ensure would fall into a net, and finally stole one out from underneath one of the bozos. It was buoyed with the sharpness of her adrenaline nearly to the ceiling of the chamber, and allowed her to cannonball into the last few idiots she and Dredd hadn't shot down, her body armour absorbing most of the impact for her.

Eventually things calmed down: the room left empty aside from a few forlornly cruising platforms that now coasted at uniform height around the edges of the room, and tatty black decorations hanging from the ceiling. Back-up to cart out the partygoers was nearby.

Anderson pointedly made no move to leave. "This place ... this area." She gestured around the huge chamber in the sewer. "Even for whatever nut came up with the Downer Drowner idea, isn't it too much trouble to build this? It would have taken time, probably a lot messing with the municipal records, bribes..."

Now she really hoped the look on her face, as she stared at something only she could see, was still professional, and didn't carry the awkward wince she would have let out a year or two ago. "I'm even more bothered," she said, "by the little arms and legs I keep seeing."

Dredd said nothing.

"They've got little faces."

Dredd made one of those growling noises that, honestly, could go either way. But when she got up to go, he followed. "Theories on interpretation, Judge Anderson?" said Dredd.

"Could be my mind is telling me there's some more mood control being practiced nearby," Anderson said, signalling him to cover the area they'd come from while she focused on the path ahead, thinking _Well, it **could** be that_. "Something that makes people's bodies lose control, that makes them act on purely physical impulses..."

She resisted the urge to tell him that there were disembodied noses, knees, and ears in the mix - more and more little people-parts going so fast she couldn't identify them, and not exactly the kind of body parts that you could explain away as metaphors for loss of control. It wasn't the kind of connection she was used to her mind making, even subconsciously.

Did this count as obscuring information from a partner? a nagging part of her wanted to know. But it was Dredd. She needed him to believe her in order to provide back-up, instead of thinking she's lost her mind or her powers, and if anyone could take what she suspected was up ahead without forewarning, it was him.

Anderson looked involuntarily towards the ceiling of the tunnel. She didn't know what was happening out there - and further up, in the sky - but she had the strongest suspicion that, in fact, she had a real good idea of what it looked like outside.

Which meant... "There might be a flood in here, soon," she said. "Unscheduled amounts of water, not a standard cleaning. It might rain."

"Move faster."

That was her instinct too - in part because she didn't think the damn visions would stop before she got to the end of this. Nobody needed to see a mouth with its own mouth that could stick its tongue out at you.

...Except, as it turned out, one Doctor Plutan (confirmed by judiciary database), discovered in a laboratory a way down from the distraction of the Drowner Downer Rave spot.

"This doesn't look like a metaphor," Dredd said, and swatted away a hand that leaped off a shelf and tried to bite him with the little mouths on its fingertips.

Anderson just focused on getting the doctor restrained for punishment and rehabilitation. Keeping her head down allowed her to ignore how her visions had been replaced with exact reality, and the terrible little things that kept butting up into the sides of their glass cages.

"I'll see to the citizens," Dredd said, and hiked a thumb towards one of the walls lined with tanks of apparently sentient body parts. He was completely straight-faced, of course.

It only seemed courteous to keep a straight face of her own, and Anderson focused on the task at hand, and put through a call for their clean-up team to hurry in case of possible flooding.

*

It came in the next hour, after Mega City One's new, tiny inhabitants had been released into safe-keeping until it could be decided where they could be placed. Lightning first, then the clouds, in defiance of history texts: then the rain. The last downpour like this had been years back. She hadn't even thought of being a judge yet, then. Hadn't begun to determine her course that way, to doubt it, and to do it regardless.

"I'll tell you a secret," Anderson told Dredd as they sat in the waiting room for the decontamination showers.

"Between you, me, and the debriefing documentation."

"Yeah, of course. And psych evaluation - they said I could tell people this kind of thing, as long as I was circumspect. Otherwise overblown expectations could start building around me." She squinted out the department window beyond him to the rare sight of the rain. "I see clearer visions when it's like this - raining, or when it might rain. It's like the opposite of every other signal there is. Nobody's figured out how or why that works, yet, but ... I guess now I've got proof it works even when it really, really looks like it shouldn't."

He grunted. Didn't ask a single thing more, didn't expect any more clarity out of the vagaries of psi-capabilities. Yeah, Dredd was all right.


End file.
